Climate Change/Emergency/Apocalypse? and English-Language Media (Jones Section)
Though climate change is first and foremost an ongoing (andaccelerating) physical, natural, “real”-world event, “it”
is also a human narrative, a “text” if you will, and given that the global climate change “story” over the last decades
(and for the foreseeable future) has been written predominantly in English, how has that fact impacted the search
for (or opposition to) solutions to the “climate crisis?” (PS: The quotation marks intended to emphasize the importance of word choice,
not to call into question the urgency of the matter!!)
This course will seek to answer that question by analyzing both the “popular” English-language science writing and media
presentations on climate change as well as the scholarly literature and underlying research on the subject.
In the process, we will also take a journey into the longer history of Anglophone nature and environmental writing, and how
that tradition might be influencing the current debate on the climate.
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